Reconnect
by myndi love
Summary: Lauren is tired.


Lauren sits in her apartment, boxes of pills scattered next to her on the kitchen table. It's a trashy apartment, a housing project apartment. The furniture is from the seventies and mismatched, the kind of furniture that can be found on the side of the road, gross and tattered. Lauren looks tattered too, she's been crying, the mascara she so diligently applied that morning running down her face, and she doesn't wipe it away. The thick strip of blond roots running through her black hair has earned her the nickname "skunk" at the diner where she works. Buttons on her white button-up t-shirt are straining to stay closed, it's too tight and too small for her. Stretches of runs line her pantyhose until the denim mini skirt she is stuffed into hides them. She takes long nervous drags off a cigarette; an open bottle of vodka sits next to the pills lined along the table. The sound of her neighbors fucking loudly next-door blasts through the thin paneling, and she doesn't own a TV or radio that could mask the sound. Scribbling on a scrap of old yellowed notebook paper, she takes random pills and swigs of vodka as she writes.

_I have something I can't keep in any more. I have to let it out. It's been eating at me for 12 years. _

_I was having a rough time my sophomore year of High School. My best friend, Lelainy, was brainwashed in Mark's basement, I was lonely and I got this crazy idea. So I called Danny McSweeny. He was the Special Ed kid everyone made fun of in Jr High and who went into oblivion when we went to high school. I knew where he lived, I knew his parent's names and I called him. I said Hey Danny, its Lauren remember me? Now this is before I was on meds, when I had those manic episodes. OK, I'm using that as an excuse, I knew what I was doing. So I say, Danny, meet me back by the trees behind your house. I was excited because he didn't sound so retarded. But he was still so scrawny, still didn't look like he had hit puberty, except for all the acne on his face. He just followed me and did as I told him to do. It was harvest time, right after dusk. I remember the lightning bugs lighting up the field. It smelled like fall, how autumn smelled around the fields with all the dust being blown up and that crisp fall air. Someone was burning leaves in the ditch by Danny's house. I can't smell burning leaves without thinking of that night. I can still hear the crunch and rustle of the corn stalks as we ran through the dry field. I don't know why we were running. But we did, to the far end of the cornfield. I asked Danny if he thought I was pretty. He said I was gorgeous. I unhooked his belt buckle. I asked him if he knew what we were going to do. He said he was scared. I told him to shut up and lay on the ground. There was no way I was putting my ass in that dry dusty dirt. I swear to god he looked like a 10 year old. I started sucking his dick, making sure he was hard, and I got on top, told him to grab my tits, and I started fucking him in that cornfield. I heard a jingle and told him to shut up. His dog, Jack had followed us. I certainly didn't want this sick disgusting Siberian Husky watching us, but looking back I'm not sure why it mattered so much. I tried to ignore him but he started howling. I really just wanted to feel Danny cum inside me. I called him because I knew he wouldn't have any STDs. I kept riding him, and he did cum. I thought it didn't feel like anything at all. I was really disappointed that I had just fucked this retarded kid in a field for no reason. Three months later, I had an abortion. _

_I never told anyone, not even LeLainy, and I told her everything. I sort of regret that now. No one knows how it happened and the only person who knew I was even pregnant was my grandma. She took me to some clinic in St. Louis. We told everyone we were taking a vacation over Christmas break. Some kind of abortion vacation, sounds like fun, huh? It wasn't that big of a deal; getting my wisdom teeth removed was more of an ordeal than that was. I really didn't feel guilty about killing it. The child of a retard and a psycho? It was better off dead. I only feel guilty for never telling Lelainy. She was the only person I've ever fully trusted. Whenever I do something destructive, I'd think of her watching over me, telling me not to, telling me to slow down, and trying to save me like she always did. She always wanted the best for me. _

_Lelainy and I always said we were soul mates and I know we are. We always used to make each other mix tapes. And then we'd write down all the reasons we wanted the other one to hear each song. God I miss her. There's this song, it's called "In the Sun" by Joseph Arthur. More than anything right now, I want her to hear this song. It's about how I picture her in the sun, wondering what went wrong between us, our lives, why things had to be the way they were. And it talks about how God's love is with her, and I want that for Lelainy because she always believed in God. She would go on about how He was protecting her, and I always said it was bullshit. It is bullshit really, still, but I liked that she could believe it. I wish I could be that naïve. And then it says something about her showing me who I was and how she changed me and my life. _

_I don't know what I'm doing any more. Why the fuck I'm talking about Goddamn Lelainy. I just know I'm reaching this breaking point. I thought maybe really writing shit down would help. I've been in and out of shelters and homes and shitty cockroach apartments. I'm tired of hurting, of pain; of the stupid fake band aides I try to use to cover it all up. It didn't work with us back then, and it's not working now. I'm so tired of crying. I'm tired of having no one to cry on._

_I remember waiting up for my mom when I was in Junior High. She'd stay out all fucking night. I'd look out the window, smoking her cigarettes, crying and imagining her painful death, trying to decide what I would wear to her funeral. She didn't care about me. She didn't care that I needed my failed spelling test signed and that I would stay up all night waiting for her when I had to go to school the next morning. All she cared about was partying. She'd come home and kiss my forehead after I said "Where the fuck have you been?!" She always smelled like vomit and after shave on those nights. She dragged me along as a play thing, being a mother when it was convenient for her, which was almost never. I remember one night I went through her nightstand looking for her address book, so I could call her friends to find out where she was and if she was OK. I opened the drawer, and staring back at me was this shining silver syringe. Everything in our apartment was disgusting and dirty, but that syringe was so clean. I closed the drawer and silently went back to the watching and waiting by the window. I never said anything to her about it, and the next time I looked, it was gone._

Guilt was a feeling Lauren thrived in, she was hollow and empty without it. As soon as she began making positive decisions, getting her life on track, she felt that emptiness pull at her and she went out and found a self destructive behavior to give her that full feeling of guilt. She nested in it, made herself a cocoon, a warm womb.

Most people ran from their problems, Lauren couldn't survive without them. The guilt had begun with her mother. A child her mother had spared from abortion because she thought that maybe this baby would save her, give her life a sense of purpose. Lauren came and she didn't deliver. Her mom was still empty and sad and felt alone. She filled her daughter with guilt, resenting her for not being the answer she wanted her to be. Guilt equaled love to the Lauren; it was in the comfort of her mother's stiff embrace. The cold insincere coos and pats she received as a scared baby made her know that she didn't live up to the expectations unfairly thrust on her and that she should feel bad for that. "If only I could have been right for mom, maybe she'd love me."

It was guilt and pain that comforted Lauren at night when she went to bed. She had a hard time sleeping without that gnawing pit of self loathing in her stomach. She had felt bad her entire life. Besides all that not being the save all end all to her mother's troubles, she was a worrier, and an over analyzer. Maybe it could all be pin pointed to the resentment her mom felt for her, or maybe some people are just born into this world predisposed for certain behaviors that are beyond their control.

Her mother left her father when Lauren was 2, having not been fulfilled by him and the perfect life she thought he could offer. Her mom realized she hated farms, the work, the labor, the sweat. It was real and not the way it looked on TV. So she left, but instead of leaving her daughter behind with the rest of a life that didn't deliver, she took Lauren with her. Perhaps she thought their love could grow in time, they might become like sisters, friends.

In later years, Lauren's mother would tell her nonchalantly in a conversation during TV commercials that she had never felt like a mother to her. It was the type of bomb Lauren knew, but never thought she'd be told in such a way. She didn't know why she expected any less from a mom she had to raise, a mom who was out at all hours of the night, a mom who thought ramen noodles were a sufficient meal, a mom who had talked about sex with her Lauren's junior high friends but never had a conversation about protection with her own daughter. It didn't surprise her that her mom had never felt like a mom, because she had never acted like one. What surprised her was the lack of sorrow in her voice, the matter of factness in her tone, the complete and total lack of guilt. Maybe that was why Lauren was the way she was, some how any sense of responsibility her mother had ever felt was passed through the umbilical cord to her fragile developing fetus she so selfishly wanted to keep.

Lauren took comfort in her pain, her burden of responsibility. It was all she had ever known.

Her head was spinning, she felt like she couldn't write fast enough. It was as if getting the words on paper was lifting a weight off her shoulders.

_I remember the time Lelainy and I went riding in her big white rusted 65 Chevy. It was just that one afternoon because her mom was always over protective when it came to me, she accused me of being a bad influence on her, the one who taught Lelainy to lie, fuck, steal, and do drugs. Little did she know I was usually the one being influenced by her. And it was rarely ever just her and me; we were usually riding around with our various boyfriends. Then she totaled that beautiful old car a few months later. So really it was just this one afternoon that defined our entire friendship. Lelainy drove, calling off from her shitty waitressing job at Pizza Hut. I met her around the block from my house, my mom was going through one of her "caring" phases, and didn't want me riding in her car because she thought Lelainy had seizures after that day she faked one to get out of our English 101 midterm. I got in and I remember we embraced in a hug for what felt like hours. I never wanted to let go. She drove out into the country, telling stories about getting out of this place. I remember every song on the mix tape, and how we kept rewinding to hear Jimmy Eat World telling us that Angels would lead us in. I remember everything about that day, the snacks we bought at the gas station, to what we were wearing, to the smells inside that old Chevy, to how gray the world looked as we drove through town and out into the country. Lelainy was in her Twizlers and Dr Pepper phase, I was in my Junior Mints and Pink Country Time Lemonade stage, and we split a bag of Funions. She were wearing that brown tank with the blue lace trim, the tiny hole cut on the side were she had carefully removed the sensor from the stolen shirt. So many of Lelainy's cloths held that telling hole, I could never have that kind of courage, my mom was obsessive about doing my laundry—she probably smelled my underwear to see if I was fucking. We had on our army jackets; we wore them with pride, badges of outcast honor. _

_We came across a little dip in the road, an offshoot to a dead end, out in the middle of nowhere. A line of evergreen trees on one side, an abandoned old shed in front of us, a barren field to the left. I clearly remember how green it was in that spot, a contrast to the gray everywhere else, I know I noticed tiny little corn plants coming out of the field next to us. It didn't make sense, it was too early for anything to be planted, but I swear there were little sprouts making their way into the crisp open air, out of the heavy dirt. I had lost my sense of direction we had turned so many times. Maybe that's why I could never find that spot again, I went back to find it so many timed after Lelainy left. _

Lauren stopped violently writing and thought back to the day Lelainey left her. It was a memory she replayed more often than their scene in the Chevy, but she couldn't bear to put it on the paper. She still couldn't accept it as true, the most vivid memory in her life where hopeful salvation was turned into yet another rejection. Lauren had given Lelainy a lot of ultimatums in their short friendship, because she wanted so much more for her best friend that what she saw her life turning into. Lelainy would fuck without a condom, she would steal, do drugs, and hard drugs given to her by dirty boys. Mark was one boy in particular that had a special hold over Lelainy. He manipulated her, he made her do things she didn't want to do, and he threatened to kill her mom if she didn't listen to him. Mark had hit his own mother in the face with a hot frying pan, so they knew he was very capable of following through on his threats. He had been in and out of juvie, he was sick and warped and was turning Lelainy into someone Lauren hated. Someone weak, someone small. She was no longer the strong confident girl Lauren had initially been drawn to, she was a disappointing mess.

Lauren had had enough, and she decided that for the final time, Lelainy would have to choose between her sister, her soul mate, and the demons that she needed to let go of before they would kill her. It was such a small gesture, but after reading the final heartfelt note scrawled on yellow notebook paper in that second grader's handwriting from Lauren, Lelainy chose to eat lunch in the smoker's bathroom with Mark, instead of with Lauren at their regular "outcasts" table. They never talked again after that small yet crushing move. The school year was almost over, and as much as they both wanted to reconcile, the damage was too far-gone, and Lauren couldn't look her friend in the eye. As much as she still wanted her love and acceptance, there was something in Laruen's pride that wouldn't let her back in. The next year Lelainy's mom enrolled her in a Baptist high school, and Lauren never saw her soul sister again.

_We kept listening to the songs that told the stories of our short painful lives. I've never been more honest with anyone than I was with her that day. Not one car drove by; it was as if we were alone in the world, this Chevy our home, our conversation the music the only thing to fill our hungry souls. It all felt magical and real at the same time. We cried, told each other confessions, memories, and deep dark secrets. That was the first time Lelainy told me what her grandpa did to her and her cousin Michael in that dark, cold basement. I felt at home in that moment, she became forever my sister, my soul mate. That was the happiest day of my life. I think._  
Lauren's eyes were beginning to glaze over. She had held in so much hate for Lelainy for so many years. And now she just missed her. She felt so empty. Raw. Exposed. The pain pills and the alcohol were beginning to mix inside her guts in all the wrong ways. Her head was spinning.

Lauren folds the papers without re-reading them. She stuffs them into a manila envelope. She takes every pill bottle, every container of alcohol hidden in the apartment, and puts it in a box. She scrawls "Warning: This is a Pledge." on the outside, and sets the envelope on top of the box of sin. She puts the box in her closet, changes into a t shirt, and tucks herself into bed. She instantly falls asleep.

_I guess I just wanted to write some shit down because I've been through a lot. And I've blamed a lot of people. I think its time to make a change. Forget Lalainy, my mom, Danny McSweeny the retard, and move on. I hate who I've become and it's eating me alive. Tonight I'm getting the fuck out of this shithole life. But I don't want to die. I don't want to meet my grandma and have her be disappointed in me. My insides are twisted, my brain hurts, and my eyes are about to explode. This decision came to me because today a young girl jumped in front of the Brown line. And I understand why she did it. But that's not gonna be me. I'm promising to make a change. I'm so over it. _


End file.
